This invention relates generally to flavored cigarettes and more particularly to a ventilated filter cigarette designed to impart a volatile flavoring agent into the cigarette smoke.
Mentholated cigarettes have been known for many years. Conventionally, they are made by spraying a menthol/alcohol solution onto the tobacco used to make up the cigarette. When such cigarettes are smoked, the menthol volatilizes and enters the mainstream smoke imparting flavor to the cigarette. One disadvantage of any system in which menthol is applied to the tobacco is that much of the taste effect of the menthol is lost in the sidestream smoke of the cigarette as the tobacco burns with only a small percentage entering the mainstream smoke. As a result, excessive amounts of menthol must be applied to the tobacco in order to achieve a satisfactory taste effect. Furthermore, much of the menthol is lost to the atmosphere during the spraying application, which is the only practical way of applying it to the tobacco. Another related disadvantage is that during storage and distribution of the cigarettes, a large percentage of the volatile menthol is lost from the tobacco through the package, thereby limiting the effective shelf life of the product.
Alternate methods have been attempted to impart flavor to cigarettes, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,236,244 and 3,972,335, wherein various carbon or silica gel materials are impregnated with menthol and the resulting material used as the filter element in a cigarette. While these techniques provide some advantages over use of menthol in tobacco, they still leave much to be desired, particularly insofar as delivery of the flavoring agent during smoking of the cigarette, and minimal use of flavoring agent in order to obtain a satisfactory taste in the final cigarette product.
Various types of ventilated cigarettes are also well known, such as the many examples disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,805,800. However, heretofore the only known method of flavoring such ventilated cigarettes was by the above prior methods with their inherent disadvantages.